Aereo Vs LTE Broadcast: Fight!

Posted by
Sam Churchill
on
February 6th, 2013

GigaOm goes inside Aereo, in New York City, that works by letting every subscriber rent a pair of tiny antennas in Brooklyn that point at broadcast transmitters on the Empire State Building. It is planning to expand service across the country, using the internet to connect home devices with the distant antenna.

Aereo lets subscribers watch and record over-the-air TV anywhere they go on computers, iPhones or iPads. More than a dozen over-the-air broadcast channels are available. The company plans to expand in dozens more cities across the country, for $1 a day or $8 a month. The company can eliminate the pricey cable carriage fees if it wins its legal case. No cable. It just uses a long antenna wire.

Customers get two antennas so that they can watch live TV while also recording a show or, alternately, to watch live TV on two different devices at the same time. The personal antenna system allows Aereo to comply with copyright rules (off the air television is free).

Aereo’s 1.5 inch antenna picks up only the 6 megahertz block of spectrum that a viewer wants to see at a given time by changing its electrical and magnetic characteristics, reports Jeff John Roberts.

To make the service economically viable, Aereo has capitalized on major advances in transcoding technology and cloud storage, according to Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia.

According to Kanojia, commercial transcoding costs per stream would have been $8,000 per customer two years ago but now the company can do it for under $20. He also notes that a terabyte of storage, which once cost over $1 million, can now be had for under $100. Perhaps the advent of H.265, which can reduce bandwidth by as much as half, will also lower cost.

eMBMS is particularly useful for big live events like the Superbowl, where multi-casting allows thousands of people to simultaneously watch the same content from one tower. It will be able to deliver multiple camera angles, feeds and stats from live broadcast video, directly a smartphone or tablet.